That Button Doesn’t Work

Yesterday in a crowded elevator, I watched a man punch furiously at the door-close button, trying to guard his territory from further invasion. And I thought back to the April 21 New Yorker, in which Nick Paumgartendropped this bombshell:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception.

For me, this was a Lewinski-sized revelation. Granted, Paumgarten phrases it as a kind of aside (much as Lawrence Wrightbroke the news in the January 21 issue that he’s been the subject of FBI wiretapping.) Still, I expected this news to spread rapidly – and to lead to a sharp decline in door-close-button pushing. Of course, my assumption that hundreds of thousands of Americans share my enthusiasm for Nick Paumgarten’s writing about just about anything appears, in retrospect, to have been misguided. I’ll be curious to see whether The Millions, with its vast readership among elevator riders, can finish what Mr. Paumgarten started. The Door-Close Button Doesn’t Work – pass it on!

Apropos of a post earlier this month on limiting and culling overflowing book collections, Scott McLemee takes on the topic (via) in Inside Higher Ed. Leaving aside whether we are somehow seeing (in a trend that would fly in the face of publishing industry gloom-and-doomers) an explosion of ill advised impulse book buying around the world, lets have a look at the solutions recently proposed. Recall that the article mentioned in the above linked post suggested conducting "regular inspections of your library;" following "the 'one in, one out' rule;" spending "more to buy less by sticking with hardbacks;" using the library more, and "beginning to follow the 'Google Books' rule.McLemee looks at a professor, overrun by books, who has reached a breaking point. A case study of sorts:At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves' worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to "the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler" would have a fringe benefit: "I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office."It sounded like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.Along the way the gamut of emotions are felt:There is a kind of exhilaration to it. But it requires full acceptance of the reality that there will be pain later: the remorse over titles you never retrieved from the discard pile.Not sure why I'm dwelling on this topic of late, but I suspect has to do with the fact that we're moving again soon, and with that comes inevitable book culling, though this time the damage should be limited. Best of all, we're finally (finally!) going to be moving somewhere where we'll be living for more than a year, so I can unbox all the books and put them on some sort Mrs. Millions-created shelving masterpiece. Brilliant.

Millions readers who follow European soccer, the progress of democratic socialism, or international tax policies may be interested in Jonathan Last'sarticle in theWeekly Standard this week about how Gordon Brown's recent tax hike - from 40% to 50% on the top tax bracket - is decimating the English Premier League. (And yes, I mean that Weekly Standard - the one edited by Bill Kristol, the one so many love to hate.)According to Last and others (like Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger), the Premier League's inability to keep or attract players like Cristiano Ronaldo (who left Manchester United this transfer season for Real Madrid for a record 80 million pounds), the Brazilian striker Kaka (who spurned a 100 million pound offer from Manchester City to go to Real Madrid for less), Karim Benzima, Franck Ribery, Samuel Eto'o, David Villa, and Jermaine Pennant can all be traced to England's new 50% income tax and the falling value of the pound. That and Spain's 2005 "Beckham Law" that allows high-earning "foreign executives" a special tax rate of only 24% rather than 43%, its usual top-bracket rate. The Spanish law is so named because David Beckham was the first foreign national to be given this status - and because the law was backdated to 2003, the year he joined Real Madrid from Manchester United.

A lengthy article in the Financial Times takes on America's squeamishness with that most perplexing of punctuations, the semi-colon. Personally, I'm a big semi-colon fan (if one can be said to be a fan of a particular piece of punctuation), but Michael Kinsley, for example, is more cautious:"I use semicolons and I never really enforced a hard-and-fast rule," Kinsley responded recently by e-mail from the West Coast, where he has been running The Los Angeles Times' opinion pages for the past year."But if abuse is going to be common," he continued, "it's simpler and safer to have a flat-out rule. It's like drug regulation. Drugs are banned sometimes because a minority of users will have negative side effects, or because taking them correctly is complicated, although many people could get it right and would find them helpful. Actually, I'm opposed to that kind of thinking re drugs, but I am OK with it regarding punctuation. Punctuation can't save your life."

3 comments:

I must confess that Paumgarten's revelation wasn't new to me either. However, I always thought it one of those things that straddled truth and urban legend. It passed the New Yorker's factcheckers, though, so it must be true.

We all work very hard at The Millions. But writing about books, despite being, uh, serious business, is not necessarily life threatening. Blogging for the 24/7 news cycle is, apparently.Sticking with journalism's good-old "three is a trend" praxis and using three bloggers who suffered heart attacks, two of them fatal, the New York Times published a front-page story Sunday, highlighting the strains and risks of strenuous blogging for Web sites like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Gawker, among others.I am beginning to suspect that the Gray Lady is attracted to this hot young thing. A month ago on Sunday the paper published a story about politicos blogging from DC. In what read like a oh-look-at-my-fabulous-blogging-life article, the Times described life in assorted "flophouses" where 20-somethings all cohabitated and blogged together, having parties on Super Tuesday to celebrate - and, of course, write about - the primaries. OK, there's only one flophouse, but the assorted houses do exist.And while DC bloggers help shape the political landscape, their Wall Street cousins are said to be moving markets, according to this academic study. Tip of the day: following financial blogs and short selling stocks accordingly may make you a quick buck - not a bad deal in this economy.Alternatively, you can tune in to The Millions, where we shun heart attacks and continue to post at our leisurely - and hopefully satisfactory - pace.

This story brought me back to my bookselling days.A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the Sex and the City movie: There is no such book as Love Letters of Great Men, which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with Mr. Big.The closest text in the real world apparently is Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, first released in the 1920s and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing, which specializes in bringing back old works.Rarely a day went by at the bookstore without a strange request: books long out of print or requests for misremembered titles were common. I can imagine beleaguered booksellers across the country taking pains to untangle the confusion wrought by Carrie Bradshaw et al. Meanwhile, Sex and the City fans who have purchased Love Letters of Great Men and Women - the book has achieved an astonishing #123 sales rank at Amazon - are becoming acquainted with the likes of Victor Hugo, Goethe, and Alexander Pope, according to the bits of the book and table of contents available at Google Books. Sometimes it is a strange world we live in.(Via my mom, who made a good point when she directed me to this story: "sounds like an opportunity for a fast writer.")